Collecting scalps

Thursday

With our beloved Red Sox proceeding deep into the Major League Baseball playoffs, now is a perfect moment to address the time-honored tradition of ticket-scalping. The Indians are coming to town.

In the age of the Internet, this practice has become big business, moving from the raucous black market of hawkers outside the stadium to the stone-cold, systematic larceny of cyberspace. We have no information on the going price of Sox tickets, but the tickets for the December appearance of Hannah Montana at the DCU Center are reportedly being offered on-line for the preposterous price of $1,000. That&#39;s a significant mark-up over the nominal $30 price tag and an apparent violation of the state&#39;s legal mark-up limit of $2 per ticket. It says a lot for the creative interpretation of allowable fees and service charges.

A bill currently before the state Legislature would scrap the state&#39;s current obsolete statute (passed in 1924) &mdash; eliminating any cap, as many states have apparently already done, and concentrating on licensure and fraud protection. That would ensure that the over-indulgent papa who shells out $1,000 for his princess to see this year&#39;s Britney Spears doesn&#39;t suffer the additional humiliation of being turned away at the door.

Despite the popular outcry against ticket scalpers, we&#39;re pretty laissez-faire about this puppy. We see it as the sacred entrepreneurial right of any street hustler to turn a modest profit &mdash; even a major one, if they get lucky. It&#39;s the American way &mdash; and the way of the world. What we object to is the intrusion of big business onto the scene, and its turning of a minor street hustle into a monopolistic rip-off. If we&#39;re going to have some white-collar crime, let&#39;s at least require a little bit of hard work, a little ring around that collar.

The marketplace is a wonderful thing, and the Internet has enabled the flowering of many new and remarkable manifestations. Craig&#39;s List, eBay, even Freecycle, all represent the democratization of commerce via cyberspace, making it possible for untold millions to participate in trade for goods and services to an extent that was never feasible before. This is extraordinary and unpredicted &mdash; especially to those who were predicting a brave new world of enslavement to computers. What is disturbing about big-business ticket-hawking is that it moves, philosophically, in the opposite direction of democratization. Instead of empowering the little guy, it muscles him out. And therein lies the rub.

The problem, then, lies not with the absolute limit on ticket prices, but with the ability of corporate buyers to purchase them in bulk. If it could be guaranteed that a significant proportion of ticket sales had to be made directly to individual buyers, then the market could simply be left to work its miraculous effects. If a certain percentage of those subsequently appeared on eBay for resale, so be it. At least the market would not be cornered from the get-go by corporate thugs.

We&#39;re willing to bet that this is possible, if enough of those Generation Geek geniuses put their minds to it. This may well be one of the arenas in which the battle for the soul of the Internet gets played out, and our vote is for the little guy, not the bullies. The votes of our legislators should be, too. Let them enlist the aid of a few of the unsung geniuses who are byte-by-byte designing this extraordinary new age of ours, and come up with a better solution. o